I am intrigued. I have an old Mac IIfx I can pull the BIOS from, an old copy of MacOS 7.5.5, and a bunch of games that I'd love to get running in a Windows environment. Anyone here ever experiment with either of these emulators?

I remember doing my junior high school's newspaper on a MacIIfx...that was the only fx I've ever seen and boy howdy was she fast...this was back when I thought my Apple IIGS was unbeatable (Amiga be damned; what can I say, I was young and stupid).

Now that you've got me thinking about the "good old days" I'm sure I'll be playing Archon and The Bard's Tale by the end of the day.

I've looked at Basilisk II before, but held off for two reasons: it's not fully compatible with Win9x (which I'm running), and it requires a separate drive partition (or at least it used to).

[EDIT: I did a little homework, and whaddya know? Basilisk II can now use hard drive images instead of requiring actual HD partitioning. Once my copy of MacOS 8.1 arrives in the mail, I may have to create separate Fusion and Basilisk HDFs and see which one I like better... or just use the 7.5.5 disks I have on hand.)

I obtained my IIfx from a past employer. The company had purchased two IIfx systems in the very early 90's, intending on using them as development systems/servers for their flagship application.

To get the app to run properly, they ordered the systems with a then-staggering 128 MB of RAM. Each. That's not too shabby TODAY -- imagine what it must have cost in 1991! The total system cost for each system was well into five digits.

By the time that one of them was being stored in my cubicle, the company was ready to throw them away. I offered to give one a home (for free), and it's been running well ever since. (The hard part is finding a compatible monitor; unlike some Mac IIs, the IIfx's default video card is slightly incompatible with PC-monitor adapters, leaving a green tinge on the screen. I've had two Mac monitors from the time period blow out on me so far.)

My PC is now hosting five Wizardries, five Ultimas, three Bard's Tales, two Castle Wolfensteins, two Archons and old favorites like Micro League Baseball and Microwave. So much for my free time...

I tried out Fusion and Basilisk II last night, and B2 gets the nod for one huge reason -- you can click one box and have access to your PC drives (floppy, HD and CD-ROM) through a "My Computer" icon on your virtual Mac desktop.

No utilities required to transfer files, no shuffling floppies, just click-and-drag transfers. Woo!

The mouse support was a little mushy (which made Apeiron interesting), but still adequate, and everything else ran like clockwork. My eBay purchase of MacOS 8.1 was a very good investment.

Fusion was a little clunkier to set up, and when I ran it from within Windows, the sound had significant static. If B2 is stable and doesn't require rebooting into DOS mode, it gets the nod. I'll have to try B2 on my friend's P3-450, however, to see how fast it runs on that.

Now all I have to do is cough up registration fees for Barrack, Chiral, Bubble Trouble, Escape Velocity and Apeiron to get rid of the nag-boxes. If only they offered a package deal...